


Becoming Sophie

by NienteZero



Category: Leverage
Genre: Colonialism, Coming of Age, Gen, Headcanon, Mild Language, Sloane Rangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 17:13:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NienteZero/pseuds/NienteZero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is a story about an invisible girl. This story was written as a donor reward for Captions for Literacy, for Teresa. The prompt was "Your choice", so I chose to write about Sophie growing up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Becoming Sophie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Teresa](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Teresa).



There were two high schools in town. The good school, and the one on the poor side of town. There were three schools in town if you counted Star of the Sea, but no-one she knew did.

She was a girl with a sharp-boned face and smooth hair. She went to the good school. The old ladies at church said you could tell, because she talked properly. There ain't no ain't in the English language. A-E-I-O-U, round like an orange, not flat and common. The teacher said ladies crossed their legs at the ankles, and always had a clean handkerchief, and what will they think when you go back to the mother country with bad manners?

Her cousin went to London for a year before Uni, and came back talking about "how nice it had been to be home" and all the spunky English boys and how maybe she would marry one. Her cousin said there was no way she was staying in this sheep infested hole.

Daddy said they were descended from the Irish kings. She would stand out on the beach and watch the waves on the shore and think about her Tristram coming across the Pacific, a long way away. She wished she had gold red hair that a swift-winged shearwater might pluck and carry to catch the fancy of a King and his knight. She wished that anyone one would see her. Daddy saw the night out in his office, writing, more often than he saw her.

They never saw her when she took pretty things from the accessories section of the department store. Little bracelets made of beads, and hair combs with flowers and pearls glued on them. Other girls got caught shoplifting, girls in the wrong school uniform, girls who talked loudly, who smelled of clove cigarettes or grass, girls who laughed and rolled their uniform skirts up at the waistband. 

She was in year eleven when she stole a bright pink lipstick and pulled her smooth dark hair back, slicked it into a pony tail, snuck her cousin's miniskirt and slipped out a window. No one at the pub asked for her driver's license. A man in a denim jacket and jeans and desert boots asked her if she was a student, and she said yes, and he said she must be going to graduate soon, and she said yes, and he said he hoped she didn't think she was too good for him, being a Uni girl and shit, and she said, no, no she wasn't a snob. And he took her outside and kissed her for a while, kissed the lipstick off. And she said look, she had to go, she had exams. He asked for her number and said she kissed okay for a posh girl.

She'd been practicing since the night she snuck out to the pub. Practicing pretending to be the girl in the pink lipstick who was at already at Uni and had a car and lived in a little flat. Sometimes she practiced sounding like a girl who went to the wrong school, stood in front of the mirror and made faces at herself as she said "ain't" and "shit," and "fuck'n'arsehole." By the time she sat her University Entrance exam, she could sit in any pub in town and pass for the sort of girl you'd buy a drink for. 

Daddy didn't think she should go to London. He thought she'd get airs, being with her Mum's family, that lot were always up themselves. But her aunt said she should. Every young lady should have the chance to go home and see what the mother country was like. Her aunt paid for the ticket. She took the coach to Christchurch, then flew Qantas to Sydney then nonstop to London. It was the first time she'd flown anywhere.

The mother country didn't put on much of a welcome. The air was the colour of _Coronation Street_ , and damp but not salt damp of the sea or the loamy damp of the rainforest. The cousins who were hosting her picked out every 'a' that elided toward 'e', and every 'i' that slid into 'u', and even the right sort of school wasn't good enough to pass here. She listened, and she tuned her voice to theirs, cut her hair like theirs, shop-lifted Barbour and Boden, made herself into the kind of girl men bought drinks for at the White Horse.

The English cousins had to go, or she did. It didn't matter how she fit herself to the shape of their world, the polish she added, the past she erased. They were nice enough, funny about how she'd never really be one of them. Funny about how a good school in a small town was still a state school, and really, wasn't it funny how the Colonials thought that England was home, when England didn't think about them at all?

She couldn't stay when staying meant that someone would always know she wasn't the real thing. But she wasn't going back. She was going forward and she was going to have it all, and be it all, and be the kind of girl that people bought diamonds for, big diamonds, because she was nobody's second-rate colonial relative from some sheep infested hole.

She wrote Daddy a letter and left the cousins a note, and took all of her things in one of their Louis Vuitton suitcases. She changed her name and found a man who'd pay the rent for a while without being too much of a pest. She joined a theatre company and let them think what they would about a past and a family she dropped hints about. She formed the story of herself from the things that people would guess if she paused long enough in the telling. Nobody asked where she was from now, nobody ever. They asked her why she was slumming, or if her family were mad at her.

She worked as an understudy, running lines and helping to pack the costumes and break down the sets. It meant she got to travel with the troupe, to watch and listen. She stole things she wanted, nice powder and good perfume, but she bought books in second hand shops. It didn't seem right to steal books.

And one day when she had learned enough, she stole a family who could believe that a girl with sharp bones and smooth hair and the right accent had been carelessly begotten and misplaced during a son's wild youth. She stole an aunt who had money and a voice like cut glass and made tiny gestures with her hands and loved to garden. She stole a season of old ladies fussing over the lost lamb of a black sheep who was long dead from driving too fast. She stole entree into the right galas and garden parties, flower shows and enclosures at race tracks. She smiled and charmed the very best people in London, and she found a boy to fall in love with, a boy who could buy her diamonds and keep her in something like a palace.

But she still didn't have hair so copper-gold that a bird would carry it across the sea and the King and his knight would fall in love with her and come for her. She didn't even have the soft sand of her beach to stand on any more. And the boy who could buy her diamonds would never be king, and the knights around him laughed too loudly and played polo and got drunk and pissed in the fountain at Trafalgar Square and thought it was funny.

And worse than that, the boy and the aunt and the whole world of London's very best people that she'd stolen still didn't _see_ her. She thought that there was no-one in the world who could see a changeling creature like her, at home in no place.

So she slipped away and changed her name, and put on the soft cloak of someone else's voice, and since she was invisible, set out to see what else there was that she could steal.

Her story went on for a long time, and she had many names along the way. Then one day, wearing Sophie Devereaux, as good a name as any, she finally stole a king who wouldn't _stop_ trying to see her. She caught his eye and he fought to find out who she really was, long after she'd forgotten that girl who used to stand on the shore. And if his knights were all thieves too, it didn't matter even a tiny bit.

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry, New Zealanders, for anything I got wrong. For what it's worth, I extrapolated from Tasmania. The bit about migratory birds nicking hair and making kings fall in love is from Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling of Tristan and Iseult, which would certainly have been in Sophie's school library. No Sloane Rangers were harmed in the writing of this fic.


End file.
